Saw you at Daddy Likey on Wednesday. You smiled. Coat shopping sometime?

I realized the other day that I get the same fuzzy feeling reading fashion blog comments as I do when I read missed connections. Just in case you're not familiar with missed connections (I wasn't until a few years ago), allow me to explain. So, say you're a hipster in the big city, and you go to an alternative coffee shop and order your organic fat-free latte, and you look over at one of the tables and there's a totally hot hipster girl wearing owl-rimmed glasses reading Sartre, and she looks at you and smiles, but you're too scared to go talk to her, so you kick yourself in the ass for the rest of the day until finally you go home and submit a missed connections ad to craigslist or your local hipster paper, and here's what you write:

M4W, OrganiCoffee, Saturday morning
You: dark hair, glasses, hemp pants, thoughtful, reading Sartre.
Me: dark hair, glasses, tight jeans, ordered organic fat free latte, clutching Kafka paperback.
You smiled at me; intrigued, but I didn't follow through. Discuss existentialism over dinner?

Anyway, back to my long-forgotten point: if you read the missed connections section of a paper or website you'll see the vast variation of types of people that others think are beautiful. You'll see people wanting everyone from "brunette plus-sized beauty at the grocery store" to "dreadlocked street dancer" to "Ben Stein lookalike." I love looking through them because it underscores how different we all are and how there's someone for everyone (which totally disproves my junior high thesis that I would die cold and alone since I didn't look like Britney Spears) and how even Ben Stein can spark a passionate tingling in the loins.

I get the same tingly (not Ben Stein tingly, that's different) there's-something-for-everyone feeling when I look at fashion blogs and see the wide variety of love and hate comments for all the items featured. Someone will say "Oh my god that blue dress is so ugly it should be burned and its ashes buried even though another ugly dress would probably sprout from the soil in its place" and then someone else will say "Ooohh that blue dress is so pretty!"

So today, to celebrate individuality, missed connections, fashion blogs, and Ben Stein loin tingles, here are some coats I would never pick out for myself (I'm so not hatin', they're just not for me) that might totally be your thing:

Mike & Chris, $322, girlshop.com

Mackage, $495, girlshop.com

Coffee Shop, $68, nordstrom.com

Searle, waaaayy expensive, nordstrom.com

$78.50 on sale, Delias.com